Stands for 'All Japanese All The Time', and is noted as a technique for language learning. Though, I see it is more as a way of living, that mixes ideology, practicality and learning primitives. There is a strong prioritisation of immersion and joy, where many of those who learn Japanese in online spheres are consumers of anime and manga, where the language is not learnt solely for pragmatic reasons, but is a hobby that helps them explore and further immerse themselves within Japanese culture. The technique has communities around online spheres, with a [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ajatt/) of 21k members (at the current time of writing, 15/7/2025). --- The learning primitives are simple, where most of the practices can be mapped to the [[Input Hypothesis |input hypothesis]] and [[Spaced repetition|spaced repetition]]. Though in AJATT, it is the ideology and implementation is most interesting. ### Immersion The focus is to immerse themselves within the language as much as possible; which could be through watching anime, reading manga, changing the language of your operating system, looking at social media in target language, ... > 'Japanese _is the ground_. That is your life. You live your life in Japanese.' [[@renMassImmersion2022|(Ren, 2022)]] Rather than seeing language learning as an academic task that is to be performed through textbooks, it is viewed as something that should be inherently fun. Where the community that often already watches anime and reading manga, uses this naturally as an opportunity to **immerse** themselves within study - without really feeling like study. To learn new languages, the time spent is one of the biggest barriers, but by framing it as fun, it does not require so much dedicated study time, but rather it is naturally absorbed through your breaks, downtime and more. This is something we also see with [[Duolingo|duolingo]], framing itself as a game and having a strong grip on the toilet-time language learning market - that would otherwise remain unused for learning. But unlike [[Duolingo|duolingo]] where the focus is on small consistency (eg. 10 minutes every day), here the focus is on large consistency (many hours every day) - volume matters! Whilst some may see the approach of avoiding textbooks or grammar rules as being inefficient, we should question what efficiency means if volume does not exist. I see the main benefit of AJATT as prioritising volume, in a way that does not feel like normal studying volume - but is joyful. ### Learning in Context Rather than formally studying grammar rules, or memorising individual words, there is a focus on context and developing **intuitive** understandings. Where even [[Spaced repetition|spaced repetition]] that is usually hyper specific, is performed on sentence cards, to make meaning of the words within context. ### Spaced Repetition Seen as optional, but useful. The priority is joy, and for some [[Anki]] can be boring. # References Ren, T. (2022, August 31). _Mass immersion_. [https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/mass-immersion.html](https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/mass-immersion.html) --- TODO * explore a bit further Japanese learning culture, and the often informal nature of it in online spheres (eg. Trenton's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvCb5_Nzq4) * link into [[Jean Piaget]]'s ideas of [[Constructivism]], where children learn through existing within an environment * talk about active and passive immersion